Women Artists Recast the American West at History Jackson Hole
At History Jackson Hole in Jackson, Wyoming, a new exhibition is widening the frame on the American West through the work of women artists long left at the margins of museum display. “Women Artists of the American West: Colorado and Utah: 1885–1935,” curated by Lucia Pesapane and Camille Morineau, co-founders of AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions), is the second installment in a two-part series that began with “Trailblazers of the American West” in 2025.
The show gathers artists whose paintings and photographs complicate the familiar heroic image of the West. Instead of conquest and spectacle, the works often turn toward intimate observation: mountain light, domestic scenes, humor, and the presence of women, children, and artists who rarely appear in the region’s canonical narratives. The curators spent months traveling through Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and Utah, searching museum collections and archives for works that had been acquired but seldom exhibited.
“Women artists were in museum collections, but they were barely shown,” Morineau said. “The challenge was to do enough research to find common themes and bring them together.” She described the process as a kind of excavation, one that required tracing scattered works and rebuilding the context around them.
Among the exhibition’s central figures is Helen Henderson Chain, an Indiana-born artist who studied with Hudson River School painter George Inness before settling in Denver in 1871 with her husband, James Albert Chain. The couple opened a bookstore that also functioned as an art gallery and publishing house, and Chain later established a school for Denver’s Chinese immigrant population. In 1882, she became one of the first women to exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York, with two paintings of New Mexico pueblos included in the annual juried exhibition.
Chain’s life was as dramatic as her art. In 1877, she became the first non-Indigenous woman to reach the summit of Mount of the Holy Cross, then painted the mountain in the same year. Her story ended in tragedy in 1892, when she and her family drowned after their steamship sank in a typhoon in the South China Sea.
The exhibition also highlights Elisabeth Spalding (1868–1954), born in Indiana and raised in Denver, who studied at Cooper Union and with Childe Hassam at the Art Students League. Her 1929 work “Cedar from Rock Subject (Colorado)” reflects the modernist turn many of these artists brought to Western landscape painting, where terrain becomes less a monument than a psychological register.
The curators are careful not to romanticize the historical moment. These artists, many of them educated white women, were part of a settler culture that benefited from Indigenous displacement. Yet the exhibition argues that their work still opens a more layered view of the region — one shaped by labor, migration, solitude, and everyday life as much as by myth. In that sense, the show does not simply recover forgotten names. It revises the visual language through which the West has been remembered.
